I Finally Revamped the Website!

You’ve probably grown tired of seeing all my posts about my various attempts at redoing my website. It probably looked like I just stalled completely a few years ago (and in some senses, maybe I did). But finally, at long last, the wait is over, and the new website is here.

Old Approaches

Originally I had my website up on WordPress. WordPress is very user- and beginner-friendly, so it was a good choice to start out with. As is probably typical with new bloggers, though, I didn’t really know how I wanted things to look and hadn’t fully found my blogging voice yet, so I just picked themes and colors that I liked. As my blog matured, however, it became starkly apparent to me that the tone of my blog’s design was very whimsical, but almost everything I wrote about was very heavy.

I needed a blog to match my style.

Themes

I realized that the atmosphere I created with my words regularly clashed with the way my website looked, so I began to look into overhauling my website to make it match my blog posts and books more. At first this involved purchasing a professional theme, but at some point during the customization process I realized I wanted more control over my site than any theme could give.

Elementor

Then I switched to Elementor. Elementor is a great way to get down in the weeds and make your website look the way you want it. It’s a plugin that allows you to tweak things using a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor but it gives you almost as much control as CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) because it essentially allows you to edit a page’s CSS without having to code or understand how all that works.

I ended up getting the Anywhere Elementor plugin to make templates so I wouldn’t have to tweak each page over and over again, and then at some point I upgraded to the paid version of Elementor so I could unlock even more features.

These were all great things for me at the time, since I wasn’t good enough at coding to produce the site I wanted without visual tools like these.

Setbacks

But WordPress, Elementor, and my existing themes kept updating, and the updates would change work I had already done and change the way I had to do work now, leaving me more behind than before and feeling overwhelmed with trying to keep up.

It was just too much for me while I was still trying to juggle teaching and everything else on my plate.

By the time I moved back to America, though, I had begun to learn about static site generators like Jekyll, and I had finally gotten good enough at coding that I began to believe that maybe, just maybe, I had the skills to redo my entire site from scratch, exactly how I wanted, without ever having to worry about foundational aspects of my site being out of my control ever again.

Coding My Website from Scratch

I really liked the ideas of static sites. WordPress is beginner friendly, but static sites are more secure, lightning fast, and - this is my favorite part - always under your control.

Rather than having to pay for expensive backups and expensive hosting, I can host my site myself on a virtual machine in the cloud, and I always have full access to my site and full control over its style and contents.

I decided to give it a try and recreate my entire site from scratch using Jekyll.

Deadlines

On the one hand, it’d already been two years since I’d posted anything new on my blog, since I was busy moving to America, finishing the Nine Lies series, and building outdoor furniture so I could write and code in my backyard. So there was no need to hurry, since there wasn’t any rush, right?

Well, like everything these days, my hosting service e-mailed me to say their prices would be going up. Not only that, but most of the services I currently used from them would now be getting bumped up to another tier, meaning I was going to be paying way more for the same stuff.

This pretty much solidified for me the need to get my website revamp done - actually, this time - before my web hosting renews, so I can cancel that expensive contract and save myself hundreds of dollars.

So as soon as I finished the Nine Lies series, I jumped into working full-time on my website overhaul.

Done

I am proud to say that I have done it. The website you are viewing now is the new, improved, hand-coded-from-scratch website that I did completely by myself. The only code in here I didn’t write is for Font Awesome Icons and Shopify (so you can buy cool items in the shop!). Everything else I did myself, 100% from scratch.

There are still a few more things I think I’d like to implement, but I’ll do them when I feel like it, because the main website is all done, and at long last, the website revamp is complete! Enjoy.